Reward for a college degree? A part-time job

Sunday

Jul 7, 2013 at 4:43 AMJul 8, 2013 at 4:46 AM

Steve Williams, Opinion Page Editor

The average tuition at four-year public colleges at the end of 2012 was about $6,000, while the average tuition at four-year, private nonprofit colleges was just under $26,000. Those numbers, of course, do not include room and board, books, and the myriad other incidentals students must purchase during the year, which adds thousands of dollars to each figure.

The June job figures came out last Friday and showed that 195,000 payroll jobs were added during the month, and the unemployment rate stayed at 7.6 percent.

How are these two sets of facts related, and why is the relationship important? Think of it this way. The jobs report says that of the 195,000 net new jobs, all of them were part time. That's because while 360,000 part-time jobs were created during the month, full-time employment shrank by 240,000. Year to date, according to Business Investors Daily, only 130,000 full-time jobs have been added to our economy. The rest of the jobs — 557,000 — have been part time.

Now then. If you multiply those college cost figures by four you get some idea of the cost of a college education these days ... which, by the way, has been going up by nearly 5 percent a year for the past decade. At public schools, it now costs well in excess of $80,000 to graduate in four years. At private schools, the cost is in excess of $150,000.

But back to the jobless numbers and the cost of college. According to a new report from McKinsey & Co., a business consulting firm, 45 percent of college graduates today have jobs that don't require college degrees. They're underemployed, which explains why the underemployment rate, which measures those working in a job for which they're overqualified, or working part-time when they really want fulltime work, went up from 13.8 percent in April to 14.3 percent in June. And the unemployment rate for 18- to 29-year-olds is at 16.1 percent. Some 1.7 million people in that age group have dropped out of the labor force entirely. Many of them are living with their parents, which is why Obama wants to let them stay on their parents' medical coverage until they're 26. Obama can't figure out how to find them jobs, so he makes it easier for them to stop looking.

Who's at fault for this mess? Increasingly the blame goes to ObamaCare. Employers don't want to shoulder the burden of benefits they're going to be mandated to pay full-time employees, so they're either converting them to parttime or only hiring part-time workers.

You'd think even lefties would start screaming about this dangerous state of affairs, but they don't; they praise ObamaCare as one of Barack's great achievements. In reality it's an economic anchor that gets heavier by the day.